


in the gunfire of empty bullets

by groundopenwide



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Angst, Future Fic, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 08:06:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11665044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groundopenwide/pseuds/groundopenwide
Summary: He wonders if he’d imagined the boat, that day. If Collins had even made it out at all. If he’d gotten back to Edinburgh and saw it in the papers,RAF aids successful evacuation at Dunkirk, and just known, then, that for Farrier, the war was over.He wonders if Collins heard about the dissolution of the stalags and thought,maybe.





	in the gunfire of empty bullets

**Author's Note:**

> so i came out of watching Dunkirk with a lot of stress and a lot of feelings, and now here we are.
> 
> i read a little about german POW camps before writing this, and apparently it's true- air force officers did get placed in their own camps, at least initially. these camps were called "stalag luft," and the firsthand accounts from them are MUCH more tame than accounts that have come out of the japanese camps. nonetheless, i'm sure i still fudged up on the historical stuff, e.g. was it really possible for a POW to survive five years in the camps?? idk. suspension of disbelief and all that.
> 
> i'm also on [tumblr](http://groundopenwide.tumblr.com) if anyone feels like crying/yelling with (or at) me.
> 
> title is from "my blood" by ellie goulding.

After the war—the whole bloody thing, not just the brief glimpse Farrier caught of it, which ended on an afternoon in June five years ago—he ends up in London.

He tries a few months at home, first, in Sheffield. His mum stuffs him full of hot tea and biscuits and her beef stew, but every morning when he emerges from sleep still skinny as rail, ribs poking through his papery skin, her eyes grow a little more dull, voice a little more empty. Farrier lost two toes and an index finger to frostbite during those last weeks, when they marched and marched until there was no use marching anymore, and he starts wearing gloves around the house so that his mum doesn’t have to think about it.

At night, he dreams of sand and fire.

He’s grown so used to wearing circles into the same track of dirt day in, day out, that he still finds himself looping around their neighborhood for hours, limping a bit from an ankle sprain that never healed properly. They had doctors in the _stalags,_ or blokes that had started out in med school before enlisting, anyway, but they could only do so much with the occasional supply drop from the Red Cross in Geneva, and a sprain was low-grade in the face of the infections and injuries that plagued the barracks.

That first week, his neighbors stop him sometimes, shaking his hand and thanking him for his service in that way that makes his skin go tight and prickly. They make it sound like he did it for _them,_ like he coasted to a stop on the beaches of Dunkirk so that they could keep their cottages and their bakeries and their football pitches. If only he had the words to describe it, the sight of those 400,000 brown bodies huddling on the shore, the sound Collins’s spitfire made as it crashed into the waters of the Channel.

He wonders if he’d imagined the boat, that day. If Collins had even made it out at all. If he’d gotten back to Edinburgh and saw it in the papers, _RAF aids successful evacuation at Dunkirk,_ and just known, then, that for Farrier, the war was over.

He wonders if Collins heard about the dissolution of the _stalags_ and thought, _maybe._

He leaves in the middle of autumn. His mum cries and cries, asking him _why_ over and over again, why now, when she’s just gotten him back. Then his father touches his shoulder the way fathers do, sometimes, and Farrier knows this is for the best. He leaves them with promises of visiting at Christmas and heads to the train station, suit case in tow.

In London, he rents a small room in a brick four-story. Finds work he can do with nine fingers. Meets a couple of other vets, Jack and Colby, who tell him that the government might pay for him to go to uni, if he wants. (He doesn’t.) Paces around his new neighborhood every night after he gets off, then heads to the nearest pub and drinks until he can’t feel the twinge in his ankle. He’s finally starting to put some weight back on, at least, thanks to all the drinking.

Then it’s December, and snow has the city blanketed in white. It makes Farrier think of German winters and too-thin blankets and blisters the size of poker chips. He’s supposed to be home in three weeks time; he drinks more. When the hallucinations start, he’s almost expecting them.

He sees Collins in the milkman. The paperboy. The freckled five-year-old that lives in the room above him. He sees a pigeon overhead and waits for it to start shooting, sees a fishing boat bobbing on the Thames and swears it’s loaded up with soldiers. He hears Collins’s name in every introduction, hears his voice from the mouth of every girl that approaches him. He makes the mistake of taking one home, once, because it’s what he’s supposed to do—but then she guides his hand between her thighs and all he can think about is Collins, grinning, tufts of blonde hair sticking out from his flight cap. Collins, blue-skinned and water-logged, floating somewhere out in the middle of the Channel.

Farrier doesn’t sleep that night.

It’s a week or so later, a few days before he’s scheduled to catch the train to Sheffield, when he runs into Jack and Colby at the pub. They tell him they’re with a whole group of vets over in the corner, if he cares to join. (He doesn’t.) He stares at the nub where his left index finger should be while they pat his back and say that it does get easier, eventually. That he can give them a ring if he ever needs to talk about it.

Talk. Right.

He orders another drink as soon as they’re gone. The barkeep gives him the same awful, pitying look he always does, but pours him a pint all the same. Farrier takes it and stares into the glass like he’ll find something there—hope, maybe. Or his own reflection. Not that he even recognizes it, these days.

“How’s the future looking?”

The voice comes from his side, somewhere. It sounds like—well, it sounds like Collins, but Farrier knows better by now. He knows that the moment he turns, he’ll just find some porcelain-skinned bird, or maybe Colby or Jack, back to pester him some more.

“Rather bleak,” he says.

When he lifts his head, he sees Collins.

Same sharp eyes, same dusty hair. A scar cuts through one eyebrow, jagged and thin. He’s managed to grow a beard since Farrier last saw him; it makes him look older, wiser. Even more tired.

“Farrier,” he says, quiet.

Farrier picks up his pint, still full, and throws it at him.

Collins ducks just in time for the glass to arc and hit the floor behind him. It shatters into a thousand pieces and drops the room into a dead silence. He says something else, but Farrier’s ears are ringing like they’re shell-shocked. He shrugs into his coat and shoves Collins out of the way, picks his way across the glass and past the prying eyes of Jack and Colby and fifty other people he doesn’t even know. The moment he’s out on the sidewalk, boots leaving fresh footprints in the snow, he bends over and vomits.

Somewhere behind him, the door opens, closes. Farrier puts his weight on his bad ankle, feels the ache, and knows somehow, impossibly, that this isn’t a hallucination.

He straightens and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. Collins is watching him, careful, still a little disbelieving.

“You got out.” 

It isn’t a question.

“Mostly.” Farrier holds out his left hand, four fingers—they’re shaking. “I never saw your chute.”

“But you saw the boat.”

“But I saw the boat.”

Days, months, _years_ spent asking if it had been real. Any of it. Now Farrier’s looking his answer right in the face, and still all he can think is, _I’m looking at a dead man._

He knows Collins must be thinking the same.

“I wasn’t sure. If you… ” Collins stops. Scratches at his beard. “Five years is a long time in the camps.”

“They liked air force. We had it easy. Well—easier.”

Farrier’s heard stories about the Japanese POW camps—the beatings, the labor, the public executions. The _stalags_ had been a god damn cakewalk in comparison. If he’d been in the Pacific, he’d likely be missing a whole arm, not just a finger.

The thought doesn’t make him feel any better.

“You got those men out,” Collins tells him suddenly. “You got them all out.”

_You got_ ** _me_** _out,_ he doesn’t say, but Farrier hears it. He hears it loud and clear.

“I’ve got a room,” he says.

They shouldn’t. It’s been five years, and they’re both just ghosts of who they used to be—trampled and scarred and war torn, touched by moments and things that they can never take back, that they’ll never be able to share with one another. They’re older. Back with the civvies, now, and they should be finding wives, settling down. Maybe Collins already has a wife—maybe he picked up some bird during weekend leave, once he returned to the Western Front, while Farrier was off running his feet into the dirt in a _stalag_ outside of Berlin. 

But Collins touches his shoulder, and there’s no ring. Just skin and bone, lines and calluses that Farrier had memorized, once, half a lifetime ago.

They’re already dead men—what’s one more sin, in the grand scheme of things?

“Lead the way,” Collins says.


End file.
